Winemaker Notes
Opening with complex with bright red strawberries, savory forest floor, fragrant spice and oak toast. Silky and ethereal with beautiful shape, flow and balance. There is great purity and elegance in the delicate, red and black berry fruits that are supported by florals and briar spice. The finish is long and memorable.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
This has a ripe roundness to the maraschino cherry, raspberry puree and blood orange flavors, with firm but polished tannins and appealing savory notes of dried mushroom, paprika and forest floor on the long, expressive finish. Drink now through 2036. 4,103 cases made, 204 cases imported.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
As with the 2019 Village Pinot Noir tasted alongside, this 2019 Pinot Noir has smoked woodhouse characters, cranberries and even pomegranates. In the mouth, the wine is fine, with a persistent thread of flavor and tannin interwoven through the finish. This is fresh, long and structured—really good.
Thin-skinned, finicky and temperamental, Pinot Noir is also one of the most rewarding grapes to grow and remains a labor of love for some of the greatest vignerons in Burgundy. Fairly adaptable but highly reflective of the environment in which it is grown, Pinot Noir prefers a cool climate and requires low yields to achieve high quality. Outside of France, outstanding examples come from in Oregon, California and throughout specific locations in wine-producing world. Somm Secret—André Tchelistcheff, California’s most influential post-Prohibition winemaker decidedly stayed away from the grape, claiming “God made Cabernet. The Devil made Pinot Noir.”
As the most important area of wine production in Victoria today, the Yarra Valley is most popular for Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, which account for over half of vineyard acreage. A gentle, rolling and rural region alongside the Margaret River, the Yarra Valley has a cool maritime climate with a lengthy growing season, perfect for these cool-climate varieties.
Two styles of Pinot Noir are possible here. The warmer Lower Yarra Valley with sandy, loam soils, produces plush and fruity Pinot Noir while the cooler, higher-elevation Upper Yarra Valley with soils of young red basalt, produces more angular and mineral-driven Pinot Noir.
Yarra Valley Chardonnay is among the best in Australia. To preserve the floral aromatics and fresh citrus flavors for which this area’s Chardonnay is so appreciated, time in barrel is restrained (though barrel fermentation is common). The best Yarra Valley Chardonnays display brilliant acidity, leesy characteristics, citrus, stone fruit and flavors of ginger and spice.
Shiraz and Cabernet find success in parts of this region as well.